1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a medical diagnosis apparatus, particularly large apparatuses operated in a centralized manner, such as MR scanners, CT tomographs or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
Large medical apparatuses, due to their high costs, are usually operated by specialists to whom patients are referred from other doctors or, in clinics, from other departments. This situation can produce a problem of reliably assigning the patient to his data which are obtained during the examination or therapy in the large medical apparatus, since experience shows the repeated occurrence of an incorrect name preventing the correct assignment of the data to the respective patient. A simple typographical error when entering the patient""s data is often all that is necessary to bring about such an incorrect assignment.
The invention is therefore based on the object of configuring a medical diagnosis apparatus of the type mentioned above in such a way that these types of mistakes and incorrect assignment of the diagnosis data to the respective patient are prevented from the outset.
In order to achieve this object, the invention provides for a medical diagnosis apparatus to be characterized according to the invention by a patient acquisition device assigned to it. This patient acquisition device is used for acquiring individual distinctive identification features of the patient which are automatically stored with the apparatus data obtained.
In this case, in a refinement of the invention, reliable assignment of the apparatus data obtained to the respective patient, which (even when other details, for example the patient""s name, are entered erroneously) enables exact checking and correction at any time with the aid of the patient acquisition device according to the invention. The patient, and the respective information, is additionally protected particularly against operating errors, when, in a refinement of the invention, the medical diagnosis apparatus is disabled if the patient acquisition device is not actuated, and is enabled for the examination only by the actuation of the patient acquisition device. In this case, by way of example, fingertip sensors or else iris measuring devices are suitable as the patient acquisition device, since a fingerprint and also an iris measurement capture very reliable individual identifying characteristics of a patient, so that mistakes can be completely precluded.
In an especially advantageous manner, a camera, particularly a digital camera, may be provided as the patient acquisition device. In the case of such a digital camera, a safeguard device with plausibility comparison structures may additionally be connected downstream of this camera in order to be able to automatically clarify whether the photograph was successful.
Thus, by way of example, a comparison with typical facial contours, including the position of the two eyes, a nose and the mouth, can be used as a comparison criterion in order to be able to ascertain automatically, and without an operator first having to inspect the photograph, whether the patient""s head was actually captured, or whether the camera was incorrectly oriented and simply photographed only the table or the floor. More exact checks are not even necessary since the invention deals only with correcting operating errors and inadvertent erroneous entries, and not with deliberate incorrect entries.
A real world application does not involve the situation where somebody lays a different person on the patient table during the process of acquisition with the digital camera and causes him to be photographed as the actual patient or manipulates him in some other way with the aid of a device used for deceptive intent. Thus, a plausibility assessment of the image from the digital camera in the manner described above is entirely sufficient for automatically protecting the actual recording. With the creation of the photograph or the actuation of the respective other patient acquisition device, the actual medical diagnosis apparatus is enabled. This ensures that firstly the patient acquisition data are stored on the respective data carrier on which the apparatus data (e.g., the image sets of a magnetic resonance scanner) are then stored.